Act Two, Scene Eight
Ninth District
Luminosa moved in a series of blinks, stuttering across the skyscape of Novapest, waving greetings to various passersby before landing invisibly outside the prison Countess Whisper had established in her little realm.
She flashed through the images - girl in her window, yeah, restaurant owner, yeah, guy getting mugged in an alleyway -
Oh darn.
She reappeared back there and lightly tapped the mugger on the shoulder, shifting the light she gave off back into the visual spectrum.
“Sorry about that misunderstanding,” she said sweetly. “Give him his money back, all right?”
One attempt to run punctuated two punches before Luminosa (again invisibly) reappeared outside the prison managed by Countess Whisper. It had aerial defenses, but Luminosa didn’t appear on radar unless she wanted to and they were intended for people who were only one of flying and invisible. Whisper’s prison was low-budget, solid concrete blocks with barbed-wire fences and cameras and the occasional machine-guns post, not the hardcore defenses you needed to keep supervillains in.
(Or out.) She blinked closer to the ground, becoming only a faint shimmer in the air.
“Let’s see,” she said out loud, to what appeared to be thin air. “I could try the straightforward approach…”
She gave her wrist a good look, as if reading an invisible watch.
“... Or I could realize that someone else already arrived. I bought you that cloaking device, Jacobin. I know what its weaknesses are.”
She looked at a spot of wall that looked very slightly different from other spots of wall. “I have so many useful secondary powers, I don’t know what some of them even do,” she said. “Seeing heat’s just one of them.”
“Go back to chasing down bank robbers, Luminosa,” he said bitterly. “I have work to do.”
“Well, I would, except that you’re kind of being a dope.”
He gritted his teeth.
“Your costume includes a watch. Stay right there for ten minutes, then tear down the wall leading out of the northwest wing’s exercise yard.”
“I don’t take orders from you.”
“Oh for -”
She sighed.
“Look, I’m just proposing what you were going to do anyway, right? You were staying hidden until there was a good opportunity to break everyone out. Ten minutes is when I expect the guards to start panicking because of how many of them just got knocked out. The prisoners just need someone to dramatically disable barbed wire, landmines, and concrete walls, and everything but the concrete your power will work on.”
She vanished. One by one, every guard he could see fell to the ground as if choked or clobbered by an invisible superheroine. Each took only a few moments. And after ten minutes by Jacobin’s clock, he could see not a one of the guards moving, and his time was come.
He flexed his psychic muscles. He could feel the metal in the wire from across the distance, feel the canisters of shot in the mines. He ripped the wire from outside the prisons and tore the landmines apart from the inside, wasting their detonation. They released their shrapnel and he caught that, too, slamming it into the walls and then pulled his hands outwards (unnecessary but it helped him concentrate) and the concrete tore open, exposing the exercise yard to all of Novapest. Then he levitated himself high up, disabling his invisibility as he did, so that each of them could see him as they fled.
“Enemies of the Tyrant!”
His voice was as loud as he could make it.
“That is what you are. That is what I am. He oppresses you, he oppresses us all. He has thrown you in prison for what you -”
Not a one of them seemed to have heard a word he said, and if they were looking at anything instead of running it was to stare at him in horror -
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Luminosa appeared next to him, slightly visible.
“RUN!”
“Huh?”
He gave her a strange look. “Run? On the eve of our victory?” He looked down. “Join me against the Tyrant! I have weapons, and with your help -
No, they were staring past him in horror, and now they were running even faster.
Luminosa blinked in front of him to take the blast, hurling her towards him. An instant before she should have crashed into him she blinked again and reappeared on the other side. He glanced back to the source, could see three figures standing on a tall building in the palace complex, barely within sight of the prison. On the other side. A short woman in fancy dress - Countess Whisper - flanked by a pair of knights: one an eight-foot-tall bruiser made of red stone, the other a mundanely tall woman in a neat pocket-lined trenchcoat.
Jacobin reached for iron, scooped up the nearest and reached for more. Barbed-wire fences, shrapnel from landmines, support pillars from the ruin all spun to his defense, orbiting around him as he hovered in the air. Iron stripped out of piping, stainless-steel saucepans, broken pocketknives bent to his will to form a shield around him.
The stone man pushed off the ground, leaping at Jacobin. He had the speed that superhuman strength brings; not controlled, not refined, a single burst of energy that propelled him in an instant at extraordinary speed. Jacobin’s hands moved, and a storm of flechettes slammed into him in midair, flipping him over and causing him to land in an ungainly crash that did not stop him from getting up again.
There was fire coming at Jacobin but what little was aimed right hit his shield. Source? The trenchcoat woman with a couple of high-tech pistols. Hah. Luminosa had vanished somewhere, but that wasn’t any of his worry. The crowd was scattering, which was what mattered.
Still keeping his defensive shield spinning, he grabbed the broken flechettes he’d hurled and wrapped them around the stone man’s waist, keeping metal together under the force of his will, squeezed tightly to keep his grip, and, via this proxy, hurled him as hard as he could.
Then, though he couldn’t hear anything, his skull felt as if it was going to shatter. Whisper had a… microphone?
His ears were bleeding. His nose was bleeding.
He sunk to the ground, plummeting, his shield collapsing with him. Whisper was singing. Iron - there must be iron near her - the balcony she stood on. He pulled it down with the last of his strength. It gave way and she fell, the microphone tumbling with her. It was a long fall as the Countess toppled, and he watched her try to go limp as she fell towards the ground.
Then there was a blur and she was hovering in midair, in the arms of… a man. Glowing eyes, cape. Stern expression. Sedaris Solaris? The Sedaris Solaris?
Solaris lowered himself and lightly set his wife on the ground, and she reached down for the microphone where it lay near her hand. Fire gathered in Solaris’s left hand and frost in his right, and Ilderia’s lightning blade slashed through the air. The trenchcoat-knight was tinkering with something under her sleeve. Weapon? Shield generator? And he could hear the rumbling of thunder approaching. A very familiar sound.
Four against one. Jacobin threw himself into the sky, and in moments he was gone.
- - -
“You let him get away,” said Nicator softly. “You let one of the chief enemies of the state, who has already killed two knights, escape.” Despite herself, Whisper was impressed. The number of people who would, albeit quietly and politely, berate her and her husband was very small.
“We had a prison break to worry about,” she said. “And he ran very quickly.”
Sedaris Solaris loomed. He had been a big man when Whisper first knew him, when (she knew now) he’d been half a boy, and he’d never stopped lifting weights, however little he needed it with his powers. Framed by the sunlight with face in shadow he was a terror for anyone who knew him or who didn’t, but while the three knights behind Nicator were reacting as expected, Nicator wasn’t. It was hard to tell behind the mask, but Whisper could tell Nicator was trying to calculate how to kill both of them. Very good.
Whisper smiled. “Now, the question is, what authority do you have to be asking me these questions? Prey, tell me who sent you.”
“Count Pyre sent us,” Nicator said. “He told us to get revenge on his enemy.”
Whisper’s mind stopped.
“Pyre? You’re working for Count Pyre?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s an idi -” She paused. “He rewards his followers rather poorly. If you ever decide you want to change employers, call us.”
Nicator saluted.
“I gave my promise, your Excellency. I keep my word.”
She shook her head.
“Pyre.”
- - -
They discussed the issue only when they were back home.
“Are you going to take her up on it?” was the question, bluntly asked by Captain Crush.
“No,” said Nicator calmly. One blast would do for Whisper, who could attack but not defend, and a single blow could probably kill Solaris if it landed unprepared; Solaris’s offense was some of the best in the world but he relied on Paragon’s golden armor for combat defense, and without time to prepare his only reactive defenses were Pyre and Zero’s elemental immunities and the telekinesis he used to play brick. But Nicator would need to take him by surprise - more like a quickdraw duel than a normal superhero battle...
“Surely you don’t intend to tell us that you love us so much that you could not bear to part from us?” said the Thunderer.
Nicator sighed. The knights needed attention right now, not the counts. “I believe the two of you have already deduced my motives. Suffice to say I prefer working for a fool to working for a clever woman such as Countess Whisper, or an able man like Solaris.”
“Pyre’s that bad?” asked Jim Skullcracker.
“If I was trying to ruin my district, all I’d need to do would be to copy him. One wouldn’t think someone as clever as Countess Zero could have such an idiot for a brother, but regrettably -” hidden behind his visor, no one could see Nicator’s eyes flash to Melissa “- while powers may, talent does not always run in families.”
- - -
Jacobin landed several blocks away.
He shook his head. “That didn’t work.”
“Sir?”
The group still wore prison uniforms.
“You tried to kill the countess.”
“I want to kill the king,” he said.
“Can I help?”